Reg Rigden and The Thames on our Doorstep - Plumstead Museum curator and trumpeter in the first British jazz band

 

Over the past few weeks I’ve been sorting out piles and piles of books which I don’t really want anymore I’ve been giving them to various charities. Among booklets something I had forgotten which came to the surface the other day was a booklet called ‘Thames on our Door-Step’. It was written by Reg Rigden,

It dates from 1979 and was published ‘For the London Borough of Greenwich’. In those days the staff at the local history archive published numerous booklets on all sorts of subjects from our past - and I will look at some of the others in the future. This one is a bit different in that it wasn’t published by the local history staff, based at what was the archive at Woodlands in Mycenae Road, but at the Plumstead Museum where Reg was the curator.

 I’m not sure the actual dates were that Reg was curator at Plumstead but he wasn’t the first and I’m quite certain I never ever met him. So ‘Thames on our Doorstep’ was written by a member of the Council staff to tell people something about the Borough and its past.  Reg wrote several other books about archaeology in the Borough – but I haven’t got or seen any of these.

So what does he have to say to us about the Borough and the River? 

In effect the book is a very quick run through the history of the Borough - Greenwich and Woolwich over the centuries- and related them to the River where he could. Reg was an archaeologist by training and he therefore starts the book 250,000 years ago in the Old Stone Age, about which he says very little except that the River would have been useful providing a mean of mobility and a water supply. He comments that for many thousands of years ‘primitive’ men lived along the Riverside ‘without an economic framework.   

In describing s prehistoric times Reg had very little to say about the local area with few ‘finds’ by archaeologists – he cites a boat found in Erith which he said could have been paddled ‘pleasantly’ up the River to end up in Wiltshire.   He says that for later periods weapons and similar items have been found and dredged up from the River over the years.  Most interestingly he says there were salt works along the Riverside where salt was extracted from River water - and I’d like to know more about that.

 He mentions the Roman building in Greenwich Park and the Roman cemetery on the Arsenal site –and mentions the Roman road – now the A2   - and speculates, I’m sure rightly, that the Romans used the River for transport. 

He points out that many local names were originally Saxon. He then goes on to Viking raids and the death of Saint Alphege.   So he soon gets into the Middle Ages and the start of regulation of the River by the City of London.  He mentions all talked about the wildlife which he says was eaten. He also talked about transport of building materials-although some sites he lists as needing posh stone are considerably inland – Eltham Palace?

There is a lot of detail about the Tudor monarchs, their lives in Greenwich and the various things that went on - some of which I hadn’t heard before.   To do with the River he mentions the Royal Dockyards and Gun Wharf in Woolwich.  He adds in Drake’s Golden Hind being a sightseeing attraction at Deptford.  There is quite a bit about Henry VIII and his work in building up the dockyards.  I have a bit of a problem when he mentions Henry VIII having ‘His Majesty’s tea’  I suppose it depends how you define the word ‘tea’ but I  don’t think that ‘tea’ in the form that we know was available to the Tudors. I’m interested to find out though

He mentions the Government rope works in Woolwich and the building of the ship, Great Harry, along with problems with the River wall.  To move on to what he says about the 17^th century - which he almost entirely took from quotations from Samuel Pepys? He returns to the dockyards moving on to the foundation of the Royal Hospital and its relationship to the sailors.  Then to the prison hulks out on the River and we go on to Captain Cook and then Doggett’s Coat and Badge -all with local connections

He covers the 19^th century in just two sides. It’s a bit disappointing - it would be good to had from the 17^th century onwards something about River management - the Harbour Master and the issues with overcrowding by collier ships.  Also something about all the small firms which serviced the River - working boats like tugs  - and of course all the barge builders and the sail makers, and so on.   There is also the whole vast network of Riverside jetties and wharves in use by various industries. – Not to mention the ferries, the gibbets and the ‘River’ police stations. None of them are included which is very disappointing.

I don’t want to criticise Reg that much - as I said Reg was trained as an archaeologist and he knew about various ‘digs’ and they are in the booklet.  The point I wanted to make is that as an employee of the council he produced this booklet and several others -for the general education of the public... Other staff did the same -That’s what museum and archive staff did. 

These booklets would be sold in the Museum and all the Borough libraries- - along with other local books and prints.  A tiny income in terms of what was needed.  The Borough also produced a local guide and sometimes for special occasions – like the Festival of Britain in 1951 – booklets which described all the big employers with advertisements from them.

However –back to Reg  -- there was something s else about him which is really interesting and what he did in his own life rather than as an employee of the borough.  One of the things that I intend to write up here one day is how Woolwich is the birth place of British Jazz—that is jazz in the form of a group of self taught young men playing round the pubs and hoping they sound like New Orleans in the 1930s!

Reg was a member of George Webb’s Dixielanders, from 1944 to-1947.   Reg, with fellow trumpeter Owen Bryce, fronted up the players.  The band was pivotal in driving the so-called ‘revivalist’ movement that eventually led to the ‘Trad’ booms of the 1950s and early 1960s. In wartime  US servicemen provided records they could copy.

The first job Reg ever did was playing drums in a dance band in a wartime holiday camp whilst waiting to be called up; he was 17 or 18.  He took up the trumpet and played with several small groups between the bombing raids. He eventually joined the Dixielanders who had begun playing at the “Red Barn”, Barnhurst – “making this drear dull thirties built suburb the source of an explosion that was to reverberate throughout the country’.

Reg admitted   “I hadn’t been playing very long, less than a year probably, and I went along to listen to them at the Rhythm Club and was asked to sit in. But, I could hardly play then, I mean …. anyway, when I joined, George switched Owen to second trumpet. From that moment I ended up playing lead and all solos for three years which did not do an underdeveloped embouchure any good at all”

Reg said “we were only kids -I was only 24 when I was sacked from the band in 1947’.  It is worth noting that ordinary  South Londoner Reg was replaced as lead trumpeter by  someone with a background of  Eton and the Guards – Humphrey Lyttleton –who was not only posh but a much better player.  One of the interesting things about this is how a generation of famous ‘trad’ jazz musicians began their careers by hanging about Owen Bryce’s Woolwich shop  --   Chris Barber and Lonnie Donegan were two more who went on to have celebrated careers in music – ‘Humph’ of course went on to ‘national treasure’ status.

So the Plumstead Museum employed a curator with an interesting background in his private life.  These early attempts at a ‘new’ music and the contribution made by young men locally are something we should celebrate but very few people will know about it...  I began by describing a booklet written by a Council officer in order to educate and inform people about our local past. We ought to know more about that too.